Donald Hoffman studies how our visual perception, guided by millions of years of natural selection, authors every aspect of our everyday reality.

We all love parsing the twists and folds of a good old-fashioned mystery -- of all kinds.

Steve Silberman is a writer and contributing editor for Wired who covers science and society. His newest book explores neurodiversity and the link between autism and genius.

At University College in London, Neil Burgess researches how patterns of electrical activity in brain cells guide us through space.

While exploring the neuroscience of speech and vocal behavior, Sophie Scott stumbled upon a surprising second vocation: making audiences laugh as a stand-up comic.

Abigail Marsh asks essential questions: If humans are evil, why do we sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to help others even at a cost to ourselves?

Russell Foster studies sleep and its role in our lives, examining how our perception of light influences our sleep-wake rhythms.

Deb Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. On sabbatical from MIT Media Lab, he's working with the AI company Bluefin Labs.

Dan Dennett made the case that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.

We think of laughter as merely a response to something funny. In this talk, cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott argues that it's a complex social behavior that signals a lot more than a successful joke. Using hilarious examples of laughter as used in foreign policy interactions, she demonstrates how the deployment of a well-placed guffaw is ke...

Patricia Kuhl studies how we learn language as babies, looking at the ways our brains form around language acquisition.

Daniel Levitin incorporates findings from neuroscience into everyday life.

How exactly does the brain -- a 3-pound snarl of nervous tissue -- create inspired inventions, the feeling of hunger, the experience of beauty, the sense of self? Researchers at the edge of science explain ...

Ami Klin is an award winning autism spectrum disorder researcher finding new avenues for early diagnosis.

Stefana Broadbent watches us while we communicate, work and go about our daily lives. She is one of a new class of ethnographers who study the way our social habits and relationships function and mutate in the digital age.

Do we experience the world as it really is? Find out with these talks that explain why we see the world the way we do.

One of the obstacles facing those who have experienced workplace harassment is the scarcity of reporting mechanisms that adequately combine fact-finding rigor with emotional support. Drawing from a decade studying police interviews and the ways trauma interacts with memory, Dr. Julia Shaw discusses how cognitive science and online tools can help...

Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and perhaps even our own body chemistry — simply by changing body positions.

Language is endlessly variable. Each of us can come up with an infinite number of sentences in our native language, and we're able to do so from an early age— almost as soon as we start to communicate in sentences. How is this possible? In the early 1950s, Noam Chomsky proposed a theory that the key to this versatility was grammar. Cameron Morin...

Who are you, really? In conversation with TED science curator David Biello, neuroscientist Anil Seth lays out his fascinating new theory of consciousness and self, centered on the notion that we "predict" the world into existence. From sleep to memory and everything in between, he explores the reality we experience in our brains -- versus the wo...

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words ...

Brain research is something typically done in a hospital or lab, taking a look at a patient experiencing some sort of brain irregularity. Tan Le demonstrates how we can take a different approach to better understand the way the brain works in everyday situations.

Anjan Chatterjee uses tools from evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience to study one of nature's most captivating concepts: beauty. Learn more about the science behind why certain configurations of line, color and form excite us in this fascinating, deep look inside your brain.

Why do great thoughts and stories resonate so strongly with so many people, and how do we communicate them? Using fMRI experiments, Uri Hasson is looking for the answers.

In his provocative, mind-bending book "The Secret Life of the Mind," neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reveals his life’s work exploring the inner workings of the human brain.

Jeff Hawkins pioneered the development of PDAs such as the Palm and Treo. Now he's trying to understand how the human brain really works, and adapt its method -- which he describes as a deep system for storing memory -- to create new kinds of computers and tools.

You use your brain's executive function every day -- it's how you do things like pay attention, plan ahead and control impulses. Can you improve it to change for the better? With highlights from her research on child development, cognitive scientist Sabine Doebel explores the factors that affect executive function -- and how you can use it to br...

When the pressure is on, why do we sometimes fail to live up to our potential? Cognitive scientist and Barnard College president Sian Leah Beilock reveals what happens in your brain and body when you choke in stressful situations, sharing psychological tools that can help you perform at your best when it matters most.

Anjan Chatterjee seeks to answer a tantalizing question: Why is beauty so gripping?